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Win2k upgrade trouble

I upgraded to Win2000 from win98 but I can't get past the startup screen. The status bar will go all the way and you can hear the startup sounds. It seems like it's completing the startup but the loading screen is staying there. I know there may be some driver updates that I need to complete but i'm at work now and trying to narrow this down.

I had originally used WinMe on the computer and read that this couldn't be upgraded to 2k. I formatted the drive and installed win98 onto the computer added an ATI Radeon 32MB PCI graphics card, got it all up and running and then started the win2k upgrade. I can get into it in safe mode but I can't find anything wrong. It's an HP Pavilion 8756c if anyone would need that info. I don't know if it would be the display driver causing this, it doesn't quite seem like the problem.

Thanks for any help with this.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live. - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

i honestly don't know if it's a display driver problem, but i can tell you that it took me about 3 or 4 installations to get win2k to work properly.

i had to install win98 and then upgrade to 2k. i did all the installations the same exact way, but for some reason something or other would malfunction. and then the last time everything seemed to have been installed properly.

you probably don't want to hear this, but try reinstalling again and see if that works. or if you can, try a clean install of win2k.

hopefully someone will be able to post a better solution, but that's all i got.

ultimatly it would be best if you can do a fresh install, but this means formating.

Have you tried booting off the CD? this should definitly work, just go into your bios on startup and change the boot sequence so that CD ROM is first, save your changes and restart your computer with the win2k CD in the CD ROM.

I actually did try the installation three times, maybe I need to give it that fourth. I tried installing by booting off the CD but it could not find an existing windows installation. I'd get a message to insert the windows CD to verify that I owned a qualifying product, etc. Problem here was I only have Windows 98 on the Recovery CD that came with my last computer. I even had to take temporarily the hard drive from the computer and install it into the old one as the recovery CD would only work on that system. I also had Windows 95 on floppies but it didn't give any option to search the drive. I even tried to install Windows 95 but those disk were an upgrade as well. I backtracked to Windows 3.1 but I had formatted Disk 1 as a Linux boot disk, no luck there! Swapping the drives to do the CD recovery worked but the first two Win2k installs would fail when it restarted. From that point it just cycled back through the first steps and once again said Windows could not be found on the disk, on the third attempt it didn't give me this message. I can get into it with Safe Mode, I guess from there i'll try and download any updates I can find and see what happens. I probably should have just gone with the full install rather than the upgrade. What cracks me up is that it took one quarter the time and effort to setup a $15 distribution of Linux for my old system. How I wish all my programs would work on that platform.

Last edited by Seer; Jun 19, 2001 at 13:43.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live. - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

An upgrade version will be fine, provided you have a working version of Windows running. If you are having trouble upgrading to Windows 2000, try the "Clean Install" option in setup and choosing a seperate partition.

I used safe mode and downloaded the Win2k drivers for the video card, disabled the existing built-in adapter, installed the latest DirectX version. Granted, I got all sorts of error messages such as the hardware wasn't found, etc. I'm not sure what exactly fixed the problem, but after restarting everything appears to be working just fine. I'm going to disappear for a short while as I have a lot of backup to restore, software to reinstall and a ton of exploring to do.

Thanks to everyone for the advise.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live. - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)